Six Sundays toward a Seventh: Spiritual Poems by Sydney Lea

By Sydney Lea

These poems--selected from the award-winning poet's output over four decades--more explicitly than any of his prior volumes address the centrality of Christian vision to his aims and aspirations. Lea looks unflinchingly at all that may challenge his faith: the cruelties of both natural and human worlds, the attractions of jolly, good-hearted secularism, the distortions of doctrinaire religiosity, the seeming pointlessness of untimely deaths; but his faith in Christian redemption shines through even the bleakest of his poems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621891253

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Acknowledgments

The New Yorker, Leonora’s Kitchen, The Return: Intensive Care, The Floating Candles

The Christian Century, Hole, Transport, Barnet Hill Brook, Dispute with Thomas Hardy

Iron Horse, Pursuit of a Wound

The Atlantic, Midway, Children Singing

Salmagundi, Small Jeremiad

New England Review, Doubt

Poetry, Over Brogno

The Missouri Review, In the Blind

The New Republic, Making Sense

Prairie Schooner, Late Season, Pietà

The American Scholar, It Has Orange Teeth

Hudson Review, Recalling the Horseman Billy Farrell from an Airplane in Vermont

Crazyhorse, No Sign

The Partisan Review, Manifest

Grand Street, Pianissimo

Antaeus, For Faith

The Georgia Review, Sober

Image, Ghost Pain

The Southern Review, Wonder: Red Beans and Ricely

The Kenyon Review, Six Sundays Toward a Seventh

Most of these poems also appeared in prior volumes, as follows:

Searching the Drowned Man: Incantation Against Revelation, Recalling the Horseman Billy Farrell from an Airplane in Vermont

The Floating Candles: Sin and Fear, The Floating Candles

No Sign: Making Sense, Midway, The Return: Intensive Care, Leonora’s Kitchen, No Sign, Pietà

The Blainville Testament: Road Agent, In the Blind

Prayer for the Little City: Over Brogno, Late Season, For Faith, Six Sundays Toward a Seventh, Prayer for the Little City, Manifest

Pursuit of a Wound: It Has Orange Teeth, Pursuit of a Wound

Ghost Pain: Hole, Ghost Pain, At a Solemn Musick, Wonder: Red Beans and Ricely, Transport

Young of the Year: Dispute with Thomas Hardy

I. Doubt, Despond, Defiance

Incantation against Revelation

On that day there shall be neither cold nor frost. And there shall be continuous day (it is known to the Lord), not day and not night, for at evening time there shall be light.

—Zechariah 14:6

Let it not be.

Let winter-clipped day

rush to dark

and insufficient clarity

of partial light from impartial moons.

All day,

let snow drift over

famished vision,

slat fences be buried

like bones in our meat

or an instinct, hidden

in harmless

indecipherable charades of sleep.

In darkness.

Let Lord not be one Lord, not be

Lord of One.

Let the country have night

in which beasts

predictably fool us

with their footfalls, cries

spilling from mazy

buckbrush, trees.

None like another.

Let the country be

full of animal rites:

the whip-poor-will’’s click and hum in praise

of his mate, the fox’s

imperfect circle

round his bed before bedding.

Woodcock tumble

through skies of April.

All day, a mystery of bees.

Let prophecy of the day the fall

foliage will turn

remain inept,

and stately tamaracks

turn to ferns,

their cascades of yellow needles a sign,

and nothing to signify.

Let cold and frost descend

to freeze the slap

of a million waves

in difficult runes over hosts of fry

of cloudiest fate. Let people not cry

the one tear designed

to end tears.

Let many a woman and man

for the cloudiest reasons be brave.

And let there be years,

seasons, the colorful comings

and goings of grief,

bolting flowers, exquisite

unmeaning in all

our protests at darkness,

pleas for relief.

Let an ending to number

be unimaginable:

butterflies

—vulnerable Monarchs—dismay

with their profligate stratagems,

wind-battered waste-motion miles;

in suicide

barnacles cluster

like salt clots over the piles

of docks, as many as seeds

of mustard, in harbors of cities

bigger than Zion

where the harsh bouquet of sulfur

clouds and softens

the looming high-rises like pity

so that out of discomfort

rises high splendor

and nowhere is pure

white Light

nor reduction in mind’s quantity. . . .

Let us suffer. . . .

Let us hail

the intimate hum of insects, say,

returning by thousands at night

and say

at least at last, There is

this order prevails.

Sin and Fear (1957)

A slate-color heron stood as the ground fog cleared and changed

to soup of August. No motion. Even the salamanders

the heron stabbed each morning settled into mud

so still the great bird’s pondering eye could not detect them.

That wicked eye appeared—impossibly—to droop.

The ducks of Swamp Creek, moulting now, began to hop

frog-awkward, flightless, out of wilted pickerelweed.

We crouched in a blind on shore.

We were all but naked, dressed in swimming trunks to be

our own retrievers. Just beyond point-blank,

we’d blow the grainy mallards’ heads off, pluck and cook them

in the evening cool. We waited for the ducks to school

so as to slaughter more than one with every shot,

and huddled in that quick-breathed wait